On Earth As It Is In Heaven

What the forest can teach us about mutuality

I live over 50 miles in distance and 5,400 feet in elevation from the nearest forest. The literal landscape of my days is characterized by blowing dust and the prickly branches of bougainvillea and the seussian shape of yucca bushes. But no matter where I live, I often find myself looking to the plants and trees around me for wisdom.

Lore Wilbert

, whose newest book The Understory released last week, also finds nature a good place to process the grief and questions we will all encounter at some point during our lives.

I can’t remember when Lore’s words first became part of the landscape of my life. They have been a valuable companion as I work to find beauty in the disparate and sometimes disappointing pieces of my story. She embodies our aim here at Beautiful Discipleship, to cultivate beliefs that reflect God’s beauty and creatively engage our deepest questions instead of cookie-cutter convictions that squash wonder.

The Understory is part memoir, part ecological reflection, and part theological musing. It doesn’t provide tidy answers or bullet pointed next steps. But what it does offer--beauty, honesty, companionship through the unexpected grief of life, and an invitation to renewed sight--is far more valuable. I hope this brief excerpt from The Understory will be the exhale you needed today.¹ And if you’d like to read the whole book, you can find it here, or wherever books are sold.²

On an early summer day, I take to the nearby trails. The path is littered with fallen, rust-colored needles, a soft bed for my feet as I walk whisper-quiet through the woods. I needed a slow hike today, something quiet and calm. Our world has felt anything but quiet and calm. The news has been terrible lately, wars, shootings, tornadoes, political drama. It is difficult to believe, sometimes, that there is goodness happening anywhere.

It rained yesterday and droplets are still fluttering down through the trees. It is strangely silent, hardly any birdsong. Above me the pines tower, like an ancient cathedral whose roof has fallen in, the gaps letting bits of light filter through to the path. The understory isn’t thick here, but the forest is in the process of being rewilded by the caretakers of this park. Seventy years ago, part of it was logged and then a small wildfire broke out in another part, burning a few hundred acres before it could be contained. After that, the state took over the land and has been restoring it ever since.

Rewilding a place is no easy task. It is long, arduous, and not for one who wants quick results, or even results in their lifetime. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise.”³ Rewilding is about relationships, relationships between trees and soil and mycelia and nurse logs and the understory. When a tree falls from natural causes, alone in a forest, they will remain there as nutrients for future generations of trees, feeding them for far longer than they stood themselves, tall and strong and resilient. But when a large disturbance happens, from wind, burning, or clear-cutting, something of this magnitude takes considerable time to heal. And although the damage might appear to be primarily above the ground, what is happening below the ground is what will help the forest heal.

I think again of the tumult in the world today, and wonder if there is more to the story than what I see and hear on the news, what I am experiencing in my own life, family, church, and more. The damage seems visible and everywhere, but is there something deeper at work? Something more primal and intrinsically good?

Beneath my feet, as I walk on this needle-laden path, in less than one square foot there are thousands of miles of mycelia. And all those miles of mycelia are sharing information, food and nutrients, carbon and nitrogen, hormones and water, phosphorus and warning signals with the trees and plants above them. Absolutely unselfishly, they are connecting different species with one another to facilitate growth, and there is a flourishing they could not otherwise sustain on their own.

I am learning that if we want to be a flourishing community and world, we must learn to be mutualists, giving and receiving as there is need, intent on building resilient and regenerative communities alongside those who are not like us, not even a little bit. We cannot be isolated. We will not flourish as a forest of individual trees who stand alone—us against the world. We will either burn down or grow spindly and impoverished. We are, every one of us, connected in ways that may surprise or shock us to learn.

At the top of a hill overlooking a small beaver pond and meadow, I find a bench made from fallen branches, and I sit for a while. I want to be one who sees the beauty of heaven on earth and not just the hell we’ve made of it. It does feel like hell sometimes, I can’t lie. There have been days and weeks and months and moments over the past several years when I couldn’t believe I was a citizen of this place and people, and we are all making such awful decisions about how to live and treat one another.

But the truth is beneath my feet. 

Mycorrhizal fungi showing me on earth as it is in heaven: mutualism, generosity, neighborliness, decreasing so even sometimes my enemies increase, selflessness, even a kind of love. Their work below ground creates a resilient, complex ecosystem with the roots of trees and plants that mix and mingle as neighbors in nutrient-rich soil and a mosaic of decomposition teeming with death and life. Those mycelia, as unimpressive as they seem at first sight, are the restorative agent, the hardest working of them all. Sitting here, I see the fruit of their labor, firs and birches, aspens and beeches, black walnuts and pines—the forest is crammed with them, thick and rich and wildly diverse.

It’s heaven here.

1. Used with permission of Brazos Press and Lore Ferguson Wilbert.

2. These links are affiliate links, which means that I may receive a small monetary benefit if you choose to purchase from them.

3. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013), 338.